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Reason
Reason
Nick Gillespie

The Complicated Truth about J. Edgar Hoover

J Edgar Hoover FBI Beverly Gage Martin Lur King

No federal bureaucrat played a bigger role in 20th-century law enforcement than J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972), who served as the head of the FBI and its predecessor agency for half a century.

Hoover oversaw crackdowns on everything from real and imagined communists in the first Red Scare of the 1920s and its sequel in the 1950s; staged high-profile shootouts with "public enemies" like John Dillinger and Babyface Nelson in the 1930s; surveilled Nazi and Axis sympathizers during World War II; infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s; and pursued extra-legal operations against civil rights leaders and antiwar protesters in the 1960s.

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